If you’ve ever wanted to teach an online course but you’ve struggled with the prospect of setting up a membership-type site (complete with scheduled/drip content), there’s a new service you should consider.
It’s called ruzuku and you can find it online at ruzuku.com. Ruzuku’s tagline is “Ridiculously easy online course creation,” and I’d have to agree.
I talked about how I found this service when I interviewed the founders earlier this year about their marketing plan.
Since then, I’ve had the chance to put together and deliver one of my own classes on this platform (Find Your Secret Sauce and Create an Addicting Brand starts again next week).
I’ve been teaching online classes since last summer, but this is the first time I’ve utilized a tool like this.
Here’s a tour to show you how it works:
There’s a lot of pros to using this service — number one being you don’t need to build or maintain the technology stuff yourself. Using this type of platform allows you to focus on building and delivering quality courses (instead of troubleshooting when things get borked).
Here are a few other reasons to like ruzuku:
- Your course is also a community. The interface acts a lot like a social media site so that discussions happen not just between you and your students, but between the students as well.
- You can create multi-media rich curricula. Add all sorts of activities and downloadable worksheets. Things like watching videos, reading articles, taking surveys, and attending webinars.
- Awesome, personalized support. The platform is totally easy to use and intuitive, but we all get stuck sometimes. When it happened to me, I got super-quick answers and assistance. The ruzuku folks are also eager to offer suggestions and really believe that your success as a teacher (and your students’ experience) is what matters most.
- Helps you created a structured, outline-based course. The tool helps you stay organized and build course structures that work well for students (the steps/activities outline keeps you and your students focused). This is especially helpful if you find it hard to organize content on your own.
The service is truly delightful to use — for both the instructor and the students (believe me, I asked them). Of course there are a few functions that I’d love to have:
- Ability to offer a discount code or manage free/discounted enrollments on my own. Currently, the work around is to set the sign-up page pricing at your discounted rate (for example, if you have an early bird price) and then change it back up to the normal rate once your discount period has passed. However, there are times when you may want to offer a scholarship or other one-off item that is past the discounted period. In that case, the ruzuku folks have happily added that person to the class for me by hand (and usually within 24 hours of my request).
- Ability to use my own branding on the classroom wall. Once logged in and working on your materials, the ruzuku logo is no longer visible to the student. But there’s no option to customize the look and feel of the background or to add your branding to the header.
It’s my understanding that some upgrades and redesigns are planned to rollout in the next month or two.
Until then, I’ll give ruzuku four whisks (out of five).
[Note: To clarify, I mentioned membership sites above and most folks associate that term with recurring billing. Ruzuku doesn't offer that type of payment option, currently.]
I look forward to seeing this platform grow and become an industry standard!
Have you used ruzuku? Or do you use another learning platform to teach your classes? Share your questions, tips and links with us in a comment below.
About Tea (the Chef) Silvestre
